I made a crucial decision from the get-go that, instead of Cool, I was going for Sweet. I was clear on this. I was cool in college. Now that was over. One day, a security woman checking IDs at an airport lounge saw me coming and said, “Good morning, sunshine,” though she didn’t know me from Adam. She glanced at my driver’s license and said, “Have a good flight, darling.” This was in the South, of course. That woman’s “sunshine” shone on me for the rest of the day. On the flight that day, I sat next to a Black woman my age from Alabama, who was in a chatty mood. I said, “You’ve seen a lot of history in Alabama.” She said, “And it isn’t over yet.” We got to talking about Dr. King and his family, and she blurted out, “I just cannot forgive those children of his for never giving their mother a grandbaby. Four healthy children. I don’t know their sexual orientation, but you would think that one of them could’ve produced one baby for Mrs. King to hold. She died without ever getting those babies to hold in her arms. Do you have grandbabies?” I said, No. “I’ve got two,” she said, “and every time I look at them, that’s me.” She patted my hand. “I am going to pray for you to get grandchildren.” When the plane pulled up to the gate in Chicago, she touched my knee and said, “It was good talking with you, darling.”
In Minnesota, we don’t address each other as “darling.” I went to a big dinner of diehard liberals in Texas and was darlinged left and right and sweetied and even occasionally precioused, but if you were among Democrats in Minnesota, it feels like a meeting of insurance actuaries, a cold handshake and a thin smile and that’s all you get. We are wary of affectionate banter with strangers for fear we’ll end up with a truckload of aluminum siding or a set of encyclopedias. We’re burdened by the need to be cool. I decided early to do a Southern show up north. So I avoided the sardonic and ventured into sweetness. I wrote a song about the town.
Oh little town, I love the sound
Of water sprinklers in the evening,
The siren tune at 12 o’clock noon, or 12:04 if Bud is late.
And when you walk down Oak or Main,
Everybody knows your name,
They ask you how you are, you say, “Not bad, all right, I guess about the same.”
Wobegon, I remember O so well how peacefully among the woods and fields you lie—
My Wobegon, I close my eyes and I can see you just as clearly as in days gone by.
As the Sons of Knute say, “There’s no place like home when you’re not feeling well.” Or, as Clarence Bunsen says, “When you’re from here, you don’t notice it so much.”
The monologue took its place after intermission, and when I walked downstage and said, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” the audience let out a soft sigh, as if an old uncle had returned. The key to the story was to maintain a modest tone, avoid smart and uppity language, stay in the background, as a Wobegonian would do. Every spring, a monologue about the sadness of leaving school behind. Every October, the glory of autumn days. In January, a long tale about heroic Minnesota winters, keeping warm by the exertion of wearing heavy clothing while shoveling the walk and throwing the snow up on the snowbank fifteen feet overhead, clothesline tied to our belts so that in case of avalanche, they could pull us out in time, watching for enormous icicles falling like daggers and also for coyotes who would take on a boy immobilized by heavy clothing.
Every week I felt their pleasure at the familiar. It was not an accurate story—for one thing, there was no profanity—I grew up among people for whom “Oh shoot” or “Fiddle” passed for curses, and so I don’t have an ear for it either. And death was rare. The hermit Jack died in his hunting shack in the woods, and a Norwegian bachelor farmer too, and my aunt Evelyn died in her sleep, but no main characters, and they tended not to get older either. Some of them remained in their late fifties for thirty years. There was genuine feeling and occasional tenderness among taciturn people, a man weeping for pride as his daughter makes a crucial jump shot in a game, old couples dancing at the Sweethearts Ball in an unmistakable embrace, the hush of Christmas Eve, the Catholics weeping as they sing “Stille Nacht” in their grandparents’ German. Myrtle and Florian Krebsbach drove toward Minneapolis to visit their son and fell into squabbling, and when he stopped at a truck stop for gas and bought a Snickers bar and came back to the car, he didn’t look in the back seat where she’d been napping and so he drove away, leaving her in the ladies’ john. Her anguish and his shame led to a joyful reunion, whereupon the battle resumed.
Lake Wobegon was a departure for me, I who once imitated Kafka and Lorca, and it led to sentimental songs that, ten years before, never would’ve occurred to me.
Look in every smiling face,
Keep the memory of this place,
And before we must depart,
Sing one chorus from the heart.
From this prairie, from this home,
We shall fly to realms unknown,
Carrying no souvenirs,
Just our memories and our tears.
We were amateurs, made no attempt to hide the fact. And we were proudly provincial. Chauvinism begins at home.
Minnesota is the best
University in the West.
Harvard University is pleased
To be called the Minnesota of the East.
Other songwriters sought the universal, and I embraced the ordinary. People came to the show and wrote greetings on slips of paper and passed them down front and I said hello to Jody in St. Joe and Benny in Nowthen and Will and Sonya in Minneapolis and I wished Rachel well on her graduation from St. Ben’s. And I wrote songs—not the best, but good enough.
M is for the falls of Minnehaha
I, of course, for Irving Avenue S.
N for Nicollet Mall and Nicollet Island
The second N is anybody’s guess.
E is for the street they call East Hennepin.
A is Aldrich Avenue Southwest.
Polis is a Greek word meaning city
And Minneapolis is the best.
It’s a bower of bliss on the Miss-issippi
And when all is said and done,
Now I see there’s one ZIP code for me,
And that is 5-5-4-0-1.
A small town was the lodestar. The show was never about peace and harmony, never about Daring to Be Me. It was always about loyalty. Be True to Your School.
We toured to the Fox River Valley and I wrote a song for Appleton. It was the Garden of Eden back when time begun. Eve took a bite of the apple for fun and said, let’s settle here in Appleton. A columnist the next week called it “shameless pandering,” but I thought it was funny. I was not out to deepen or broaden. I was a man at play.
I went dancing one night in East Lansing
We sowed wild grains across the Great Plains
Spent a wild youth in Duluth
Found euphoria and joy in Peoria, Illinois,
And my all in St. Paul—It’s you—that’s the truth.
In the early years, musicians doubled as actors and I walked around backstage, scripts in hand, and asked for volunteers. Some musicians were eager, others dreaded the thought. Bluegrass musicians preferred to stay in safe territory and not have to shout, “Allons, camarades!” and cross swords with a guy named Pierre who turned out to be a woman, but singers were always game, and so were bass players. Still, there was an awkward self-consciousness about it—and when I found out that George Muschamp and Molly Atwood, who lived across the street from me in St. Paul, were actors in the Children’s Theatre Company, I grabbed them and they were great and we never looked back.
I turned a New Yorker story of mine, “Lonesome Shorty,” into “The Lives of the Cowboys” about Dusty and Lefty and it went on for decades. Tom Keith did horse snorts and whinnies, the pouring of whiskey in the glass, the shuffling of cards, the slow tread of the big boots of the bully Big Messer as he approached, the cocking of his pistol, the slow leakage of gas from him despite his attempts to tighten his sphincter, the lighting of a match, the e
xplosion that sends him crashing into the aspidistra, and all I had to do was write dialogue.
LEFTY: I got a confession to make, pardner. Whilst I was making that soup, I dropped a bar of soap in it by accident and by the time I fished it out, it was a fraction of its former size.
DUSTY: So that’s why you didn’t have any soup yourself.
LEFTY: I wasn’t hungry.
DUSTY: I wouldn’t’ve been either if I’d known there was soap in it.
LEFTY: Well, you ate two helpings of it.
DUSTY: Didn’t know it was soap soup.
LEFTY: You couldn’t taste it?
DUSTY: Tasted about as good as anything else you ever cooked.
LEFTY: Well, maybe I should make it more often then.
DUSTY: I guess you didn’t notice that there was more bourbon in the bottle last night than there was yesterday morning when it was practically empty.
LEFTY: What are you saying?
DUSTY: Take a wild guess.
LEFTY: Are you saying you pissed in the whiskey?
DUSTY: Nope. It’s horse piss. You drank three glasses of it, evidently you’ve forgotten what good whiskey tastes like.
LEFTY: Why in the world would you go and do a thing like that?
DUSTY: I’m trying to stop drinking.
LEFTY: So that’s why you didn’t have any.
DUSTY: It works!
Writing for The New Yorker was an uphill climb—shadows of Perelman and Frazier and Woody Allen on the wall—but with radio, the coast was clear: the greats were long gone—we had no competitors, nobody else did scripted comedy on radio. It was a walk in the park compared to my dad’s hard labors—working on the train, building our house, doing carpentry for others, raising a garden. I was the boss, so my work was never rejected except by me. Nobody said, “I’m sorry, but this is not you at your best.” Maybe it wasn’t, but we had a show to do and better and best don’t mean all that much when you’re the only café in town. Shut up and enjoy your pancakes.
I played the title role in Dr. Brad Triplett, Wildlife Urologist, performing a prostatectomy on a white-tailed deer and explaining to my adoring nurse Sharon that urine is how wild animals mark territory and so a urinary dysfunction also affects social standing and the ability to mate, which is why I gave up my lucrative practice in Winnetka to work the woods of northern Wisconsin—“Yes, the deer are overpopulated,” I said. “But a doctor can’t play God. We’re here to help, not to judge the worth of a life. A man has to follow his heart, and this is my mission. Urine is in my blood somehow.”
I wrote the sketch after a visit to Mayo and a consultation about my prostate. Real life fed the imagination, just like the Mississippi turned the wheels that ran the mills of Minneapolis. There was no agony involved, I just sat and wrote sketches, monologues, songs for the pleasure of it. E.g., the childish pleasure of rhyme:
Long distance information, give me South St. Paul,
Someone down at FedEx just gave me a call.
The wedding’s in an hour when she and I’ll be hitched.
It’s a package from my dentist, and it’s my lower bridge.
I bought her the big diamond and a fancy bridal wreath,
But I don’t think she’ll marry me if I don’t get my teeth.
I’ll be in the parking lot, so tell them, hurry please,
My car’s the one with tin cans and the windows smeared with cheese.
A simple story straight from me to you. So simple. Everyone else in public radio lived with the burden of high standards, shades of the BBC— the ambition to do investigative stories on the moisture of oysters farmed in Worcester. Not I. Parody was my beat, and my generation had a wealth of big shots to beat up on—Bob Dylan, for one.
May you grow up to be beautiful
And very rich and slim.
May God give you what you want
Though you don’t believe in Him.
May you stick your finger in the pie
And always find the plum
May you stay forever dumb.
And once, for a show at Bethel Bible College, we sang “Catch a Wave” (If you’re saved, you’ll be sitting on top of the world ). And a wedding sketch in which the bride sang (to the bridal march from Wagner’s Lohengrin: Why am I here? Who is this man? Why is he dressed up and holding my hand?) and the groom (Why does she cry? I wish she’d stop. I’m not bad looking and I have a job. I don’t smell bad. I am not gay. I’m in good shape and I floss twice a day.) and the minister (It’s not so bad. It could be worse. It’s better than coming to church in a hearse. Just say the words that must be said and then you can undress and go off to bed.).
20
An Essay on Cowardice
IN FOXE’S BOOK OF MARTYRS, I found a Keillor who was burned at the stake by Catholics for reading his Bible, and I made a note to avoid martyrdom and so far have succeeded. If ordered at swordpoint not to read the Bible, I would be okay, I have enough of it memorized to last me for a while.
The one time martyrdom was offered was in the summer of 1968 when I was ordered by Local Selective Service Board No. 51, Hennepin County, to report for induction into the Army on a specified Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. I wrote back to say I would not report because the war in Vietnam was immoral—mindless carnage, the weekly body count, B-52s bombing rice paddies, Marines in choppers barreling down into villages, all in defense of a corrupt regime, a war irreconcilable with our values, etc., etc.—it was a long letter, about four pages in ballpoint on lined yellow paper, and I did not show up to board the bus for boot camp on that Tuesday. I expected an FBI guy in a shiny gray suit and aviator shades to knock at my door with a warrant for my arrest.
The day I was ordered to report, I went to visit my Uncle Don and Aunt Elsie, who still were fond of me though I’d left the Brethren. My sweet-tempered aunt, who kept her girlish enthusiasm all of her life, and my plain-spoken uncle, who was bigger than anyone else and also more boyish and loved games and sports. We sat on their porch and talked about old times. I recalled the tremendous line drive he hit in a softball game at the 1956 Grace & Truth Bible Conference at Lake Minnetonka, Married Men vs. Single. It was in the middle innings, the score close, the game in the balance, I was playing third base for the Single Men, and he came up to bat and took a big cut at an inside pitch and hit a scorcher down the third-base line that had double written all over it. It bounced just inside the line and took off from the topspin, and I stabbed the glove to my right, backhanded the ball, planted my right foot, saw Uncle Don steaming toward first, and threw him out by a stride. I told him that this play was a highlight of my entire life. He said: “The reason you remember that play so well is that it was the only time you ever threw anyone out from third base.”
I kept expecting the knock right up to when I started A Prairie Home Companion in 1974 and so I never used my name on the air lest I wind up at Sandstone prison, and the knock on the door never came. Probably it was a bureaucratic glitch, papers misplaced, the discrepancy of the two names, Gary had been ordered to report, Garrison wrote the letter saying no, though I liked to imagine a savior at the draft board, a clerk who was moved by my letter and at great risk to herself stuck my file in the Inactive drawer. Being a draft dodger makes Memorial Day more meaningful to me. The Light Brigade rode into the valley of death on the orders of an arrogant fool, and men have been riding off to death in behalf of arrogant fools ever since. Vietnam was a lost cause, and anyway it didn’t matter to the security of the United States. Saigon fell and now cruise ships stop at Ho Chi Minh City and life goes on except for the dead. They died for their own sense of honor and nothing more. You walk along the Vietnam Memorial wall and you know that many of those honored dead were dissenters but went anyway. I hope the man who was called in my place got assigned to the Army Post Office in New York City, like my dad, and spent two years in the city and developed a taste for Japanese cuisine and Broadway musicals and returned, safe and sound, to Minneapolis. I wish I could meet him so I could honor
him for his service.
I escaped the draft, and my ancestor Elder John Crandall escaped the Puritans of Massachusetts, who drowned young girls accused of witchcraft. He was once arrested in Boston for preaching Christian charity toward the Algonquin people, and some men who were arrested with him that day were publicly whipped, one of them whipped to death, but Elder John got to Rhode Island to join Roger Williams and the Baptists and founded the town of Westerly. I don’t know if he’d want me as a descendant but I’m proud to have him, and the fact that our connection also connects me to Katharine Hepburn and Lucille Ball is no problem whatsoever. But in his place, I wouldn’t have preached to men who were holding whips, I would’ve bit my tongue and headed west and found a nice Quaker settlement somewhere.
In 1776, a number of Crandalls loyal to the Crown fled to Canada to escape the Revolution. They didn’t find ease and comfort up there, and the nineteenth century was as grim for them as for everyone else. Aunt Ruth had a little piece of hand stitching:
Susanne Crandall is my name & Canada is my nation.
Amherst is my home & Christ is my salvation.
I am a girl of ten years old. When I am lying dead and cold
& all my bones are rotten,
If this you see, remember me. When I am quite forgotten. 1841
A girl of ten meditating on death and ignominy, sewing a little monument for herself—and I know nothing about her except that she had the same morbid streak I had at that age.
I know more about my distant ancestor Prudence Crandall, who opened a school for young women in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1831. When several young women of color applied for admission, Prudence accepted them, whereupon the town turned against her. She was jailed, a mob attacked the school and broke the windows, and Prudence closed up shop and lit out for Illinois and then Kansas Territory and took up the cause of women’s suffrage. She did not live to see it come to pass, but she knew what was right. Had it been my school, I would’ve asked the young women of color to wait while I formed a committee of educators to study the matter, solicit community input, and find a solution that everyone could live with. I also would’ve upped my property insurance.
That Time of Year Page 18